Paper short abstract:

Jesuit frontier missions in Brazil and Paraguay promote native and mixed communities that ultimately clash with colonial interests yet offer cross-cultural forms that redefine indigenes and colonists. How do recent colonial studies interpret cross-cultural agents and related issues of appropriation?

Paper long abstract:

Since the Quincentenaries of Columbus' 1492 and Cabral's 1500 encounters with America and Brazil, various scholars have advanced significant revisions of the established models of European conquest, conversion, and colonisation. In particular, recent studies have emphasised deeper exchanges of cultural models so that certain types of settlement are seen as complex forms of mixed traditions. One such case involves the famous Jesuit reductions along the frontiers of Brazil, which have long been the subject of pious propaganda and critical controversy. What recent approaches to these missions highlight is the need to redefine the nature of cross-cultural forms, deconstruct mission myths, and reevaluate intermediary roles. Key examples reveal cross-cultural understandings of 'marginal' native settlements and 'autonomous' communities, whose justification and representation continously change as they come into growing conflict with missionary projects and colonial expansion. Who 'owns' the native convert communities? Although missionaries claim to promote native autonomy, when church and state contend for control of the frontier missions, utopian models of mixed communities are sacrificed to pragmatic colonial interests. However, cross-cultural forms and roles that integrate native contributions do survive in frontier settlements themselves during and after the dissolution of Jesuit reductions.